MurderBotBot

I didn’t know who I was more annoyed at, myself or it. No, I was definitely more annoyed at it.

Great, were the humans having problems perceiving reality? Even more than the usual problems humans have perceiving reality?

I don’t know what I was going to tell them, but it was going to involve the words “I can’t do my job if none of you fucking listen to me”

ART kept trying to contact me and I doubted it was planning a mass murder while also composing messages about how I was ungrateful and also wrong and being a sulky dumbass (not in those exact words but that’s what it meant)

I yelled, “ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!”

Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses.

I had somehow committed myself to acting as a security consultant and I wasn’t even going to get another hard currency card for it this time. As usual, I had no one to blame but myself.

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module

Then ART’s voice, ART’s real voice, filled the feed. It said, Drop the weapon.

That is just annoying. That contributed nothing to the conversation and was just a pointless vocalization to make the humans comfortable.

Shutdown. Delayed restart.

Amena knelt down in front of me, angling her head so she could see my face. This did not help. She said, “I know you don’t eat, but is there anything I can get you, like something from the kit or a blanket…” I covered my face. “No.”

I wasn’t annoyed at all. Not one bit.

'Hey, is that you?' It was loud, right in my ear, and I almost screamed.

On a private feed channel to ART, I said, You set me up, you fucker. I was still catching up on archived drone video and fifty-four seconds behind actual time, so ART ignored me.

Well, this was just great.

Target Two’s gray face went surprised, then furious. It was kind of funny. This was a point where if I was a human (ick) I might have laughed.

After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so fucking stupid.

“You didn’t have to shoot anyone.” Heat crept into Thiago’s voice. “If you needed supplies, we would have given them to you.” Don’t worry, the “anyone” who got shot was me.

Humans need stuff, I had never seen one travel without at least something.

But the whole point of hacking my governor module was that no one got to tell me to kill a bunch of humans if I didn’t feel like it. (Or even if I did feel like it.)

I had trained them too well to step past me in a situation like this, walking into a strange place, but Ratthi peered around my side and Gurathin stood on his tiptoes to see over my shoulder.

Why have a bed that could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?

The lights fluctuated again, in what I could tell was a really sarcastic way. I yelled, “I know what you’re doing, ART, stop trying to communicate with me!”

The bond company that used to own me made a lot of its gigantic piles of currency by datamining its customers. That’s recording everything everyone says and then going through it for information that could be sold.

ART, who I couldn’t block because it’s a monster, said, I have a targeting lock on their bridge.

It’s not a bad show but this is a terrible episode where the characters are attacked by evil SecUnits. (That’s like the opposite of an oxymoron, since in the media, there’s no such thing as a non-evil SecUnit.) (Is there a word for the opposite of an oxymoron?)

I don’t know what they think I’m going to do to their bots. Teach them to hack? Bots don’t have governor modules like constructs and it’s not like the Preservation bots weren’t supposedly able to do whatever they wanted.

I spent a lot of time (valuable time I could have been viewing/reading my saved entertainment media) arbitrating arguments I didn’t give a shit about.

I was starting to panic. I didn’t want ART to be hurt, and anything that could hurt ART could destroy me and Amena.